Joe Biden Is the Least of Democrats’ Problems

Well, folks, the Democratic Party really went through it this week. Last weekend, it was disclosed that former President Joe Biden was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of prostate cancer that had metastasized to his bones. Coming smack-dab in the center of the hype cycle from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book about how Biden’s inner circle kept his infirmity out of sight, the episode only magnified the party’s gerontological problems. On Wednesday, like a rush delivery from the coda store, all of this was underscored by the passing of Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly, who recently was named the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee despite his own cancer diagnosis.

The Democrats’ Biden reckoning is a real choose your own adventure. To my mind, this was a case of elite failure: not just from the fabled “politburo” troika of Biden insiders that led the charge to keep Biden’s struggles from the limelight, but also from the party elders who engineered this mishap in the first place. They slaughtered their younger candidates in the 2020 presidential primary, mercilessly took down the one among them who dared to suggest Biden was too old, and forced a party-wide acclamation of Biden’s nomination following the South Carolina primary, which put us irrevocably on the path to his subsequent 2024 candidacy. This was, indeed, the Original Sin.

While there’s no end of atoning to do, some commentators have stretched this melodrama to the breaking point by suggesting that Biden’s “age and mental acuity” will be a litmus test for the party’s 2028 candidates. Let me just say this: I truly hope that it will be one, because if voters in three years still care a whit about Biden then that would mean the economy did not end up in shambles, the constitutional order and the rule of law are still very much intact, and the decimation of the civil service has been reversed. This is what a lot of pundits don’t understand: The only way Biden would have salience as a “litmus test” issue in 2028 would be if his successor governed through wisdom and competence.

Naturally, that will not be the case because Biden’s successor is Donald Trump—an omnidirectionally corrupt fuckup and criminal. If anything, Trump has provided a new avenue for those journalists who maybe neglected the story of Biden’s mental infirmity to redeem themselves, by hopping on the story of Trump’s own mental infirmity. Though oddly, few seem to be working that beat, and many of the voices that admonished the Biden-era media for these failings have fallen curiously silent. (TNR, I should note, is all over the story of Trump’s cognitive decline.) That’s too bad: The scandals at the core of the Tapper-Thompson tome remain live issues in American life. Gather unto you some scoops, reporters! This is low-hanging fruit!

Meanwhile, as the entire political journalism industry dithers, Republicans are using the story as a heat shield to skate on their bad plans for the country and their worse abuses of the Constitution. Flying under the radar this week is a report from the Cato Institute that included detailed profiles of 50 undocumented immigrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador even though they were not guilty of any crimes while stateside. The administration ran afoul of another federal judge after shipping another group of migrants to South Sudan, a nation that’s on the verge of a renewed civil war.

In Washington, Republicans are trying to bring a budget bill to term that will slash programs for the needy to furnish a one-time payout for plutocrats, throw millions off their health insurance, and explode the budget deficit. Beyond that, we have the ongoing crimes of the administration that I laid out last week, up to and including the needless deaths that will occur at the hands of Elon Musk’s destruction of critical aid agencies and Robert F. Kennedy’s lethal grotesqueries of public health. All of which is to say: There will be no reason in the world for any Democrat worthy of office to be on any kind of apology tour by the time 2028 rolls around.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be critical litmus tests for Democrats—or that all of them will pass with flying colors. Right now, the most important way that the Democratic leaders of the future are going to distinguish themselves will be the extent to which they devote their lives to fighting Trump, tooth and nail. As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall wrote this week:

The overriding problem Democrats have today is a general belief that they’re not effective at fighting for what they believe in or what the country needs to be protected from. There’s a related, but secondary issue that they worry that Dems are most focused on issues that are obscure or not connected to the lives of the great majority of people struggling to make ends meet. That lack of fight is shattering for self-identified Democrats as well as highly damaging for genuine independents and low-information voters who genuinely flip from party to party from election to election. That is overwhelmingly the challenge Democrats have right now.

“The idea,” Marshall adds, “that up-for-grabs voters are waiting for important signals out of a bizarre intra-party score settling over Joe Biden’s age is just such unreal bubble thinking that it beggars belief.” Meanwhile, if we are looking to recent events for Democrats failing those crucial litmus tests, consider the fact that 16 of them joined Trump’s Senate acolytes in passing a crypto-friendly deregulation bill, in just the latest example of the party’s willingness to cave to that scam industry. The fact that this bill would most likely set the clock ticking on the next great financial crisis, in much the same way that the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 paved the way for the last one, is to my mind a more massive failure than anything that Biden’s inner circle did as they conspired to hide his enfeeblement.

At any rate, for those so concerned about Biden and his health, I’ve good news: He won’t be running for office again. The Democratic campaigns of the future can and should opt to neither hire nor rely upon the bad and incompetent advisers whose actions helped Trump get elected.

These are the easy bars to clear. More important litmus tests remain: Who fought the hardest? Who proved worthy of the public trust? Who best used the tools available to them to relentlessly discredit Trump and the GOP? Who sent packing the small army of loser pollsters and consultants that have kneecapped the party? Who successfully learned to speak to the public like someone not umbilically connected to a Beltway focus group? The road out of the Trump Dark Ages will be paved by those who pass those tests, not those who occupy the pundit-approved opinion on a prior president who, come 2028, will be … well, let us not speculate.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

What’s in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it’s certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State’s senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump’s unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. “It’s a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,” he said. “He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.”

One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you’re being shrill or alarmist. “I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,” Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who’s spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she’s correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.

Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he’s rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush’s reign was much more costly than Trump’s. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR’s Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump’s trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers.

This week’s skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they’re gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: “The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI’s investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren’t dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR’s Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. “The net effect of these policy changes,” Ford writes, “is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.”

Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.”

The administration’s approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world’s regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration’s decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively.

This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.

It’s an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration’s unlawful torture network to Wall Street’s ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The “look forward, not backward” ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration.

Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults’. This is where the avatars of “Let the bad guys off the hook and move on” obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they’ll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical.

We hear so much about the “rule of law” these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the “rule of law” is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It’s time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

It goes without saying that Democratic voters have developed some grave misgivings about the party’s gerontological bent. Well before President Joe Biden’s advanced age took him out of the 2024 presidential race, a Pew poll found that 79 percent of Americans favored some kind of age limit on elected officials. The fever for fresh blood and fighting energy has only advanced since then. As The Washington Post reported last month, “Younger Democrats are treating their party’s age issue with more urgency after” Biden’s loss.

The Wall Street Journal added fuel to the fire last week with a story that pitted younger House Democrats against their elders. “Age is a bigger headache for Democrats than Republicans for one central reason: Democrats have a lot more old members,” the Journal noted. This has come at a cost recently: Five House Democrats have died in office in the past 11 months. All were 65 or older; younger replacements might have been able to kill key GOP bills, had some key vacancies been filled. Another aging Democrat, Gerry Connolly, will have to give up his recently claimed ranking membership of the House Oversight Committee because the severe cancer diagnosis he was dealing with at the time of his ascension did not magically get better.

The Journal suggests that tensions are spiking: “Now, some younger Democrats are pushing to oust older party lawmakers, citing the need to connect more closely with the next generation of voters and energetically spar with Trump.” Representative James Clyburn went on the record to offer some wan pushback. “Nancy left her seat. Steny left his seat. I left my seat. What the hell I’m supposed to do now?” said Clyburn, who is 84, when asked about promoting younger members. “What do you want—me to give up my life?” There are many good reasons to vote for someone, but doing so to allow an aging grandee to cling to relevance deep into retirement age isn’t among them.

I’m sensitive to the argument that we cannot just discount experience and hard-won knowledge, and anyway, age isn’t the Democrats’ main fault line. What I’m seeing emerge among the Democratic base isn’t so much a tension between old and young but between inertia and the willingness to fight hard against Trumpian misrule. And that’s going to make for some strange bedfellows: Right now, the octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders and the much younger Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are raising hell on an anti-oligarchy tour; they’re going to end up basically in the same trenches against Trump as would-be presidential candidate and current Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is—let’s face it—pretty much an oligarch himself. Still, these are three Democrats raring for a fight, while others either blanch at the prospect of open conflict or simply accommodate Trump.

It may be that age really is only a number. But having the ability to nimbly adapt to a new way of doing political business, in a media-information environment unlike the one with which we began this century, is what should determine if someone has a place in the Democratic Party’s ranks. In that sense, Clyburn is asking the right question: “What am I supposed to do now?”

I’m happy to assist. The most important thing any Democratic elected official can do today is wake up each morning planning to relentlessly criticize and discredit the president and his party, who give Democrats a lot to work with. This is a task that needs far greater participation among Democrats than I’m currently seeing, especially on the economic front. As I said last week, we are headed into the Summer of Scarcity, which means barren shelves, shuttered businesses, lost jobs, and a deep recession. For Democrats too afraid to talk about anything but “kitchen table issues,” this is your moment. Get after it!

I worry a lot when Clyburn says stuff like, “I think the message coming from the Democratic Party is a good message.… The problem we’ve got, I’ll say, is that we have to depend upon the media to deliver it.” Sorry, Jim, but I’ve been over this. We aren’t reforming mass media anytime soon. We have to use the cynical one we’ve got, and that means giving it what it wants: conflict, controversy, cheap shots. If you want your message in the media, you have to load up the cannon and fire. You have to give up the high road and get in the gutter, where the big political battles are fought these days. Instead of trying to beat Trump with gauzy appeals to high-flown principles, you need to follow The New Republic’s Tori Otten’s advice: Get mean and stay petty.

The Democratic Party also needs some of its members and best-known figures to start seeding the earth with the future they envision if they return to power. This begins with paving the way for “CTRL+Z 2028”—a promise to undo the damage done to the civil service with the same alacrity and doggedness with which Trump and his flunky Elon Musk destroyed it. Those plans, by the way, emerged into public view two years before the presidential election—numerous reports revealed the magnitude of right-wing schemes to dismantle the government, and numerous figures were excited to talk about the shock-and-awe tactics they were going to deploy. If we aren’t soon seeing similar stories about Democratic plans for renewal, then something is deeply wrong.

Lastly, in the middle ground between quickfire attacks and long-range vision there is the basic task of holding the Republican Party accountable. As federal jobs get cut, grants get gutted, and the important work of keeping Americans safe and healthy goes undone, Democrats need to be counting up the costs to ordinary people and raising holy hell about the harms that the Trump administration is unleashing. In fact, they allegedly have a plan to do just that: Back on April 4, the Democratic National Committee’s Ken Martin announced that the party would be launching a “People’s Cabinet,” as part of an effort to “fiercely counter Trump’s chaos and lies.” But here we are, a month later, and no such shadow Cabinet has emerged on the scene. I suspect I know why this has foundered: The party is still too in thrall to what’s known as “the iron law of institutions,” and cannot nimbly start creating positions of perceived influence without first walking through a minefield of seniority, entitlement, and ego.

Democrats need their own anti-DOGE, they need their own Project 2025, and they need to get this People’s Cabinet—or something else with the same goals—off the ground. What we need less of is navel-gazing, pissing and moaning about your cable news coverage, sops in the direction of “working with Trump” and “reaching across the aisle,” defending outdated norms, and heeding the suggestions of political consultants who haven’t made a correct observation since last century, if ever. If you’re up for the real job of uprooting Trump and building a better future, then I say it’s fun for all ages. But if you’re only suited for the latter set of tasks, then it doesn’t matter if you’re 25 or 75—politics just isn’t your bag.

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office may have been the longest, figuratively speaking, of any U.S. president in history. But we can also say definitively that they were the most disastrous, ever. His draconian deportations, destruction of the federal government, and insane tariff Tilt-a-Whirls have driven his approval numbers so low as to be a modern marvel; the last time a president was this disliked after 100 days, we were fighting a world war and the Slinky was the country’s most popular toy. Trump has ended up here for no other reason than that he pursued the very policies he promised to pursue on the campaign trail. That’s the story of his first 100 days: Americans elected a dumb asshole, and natural consequences followed.

Now let’s consider the next 100 days, which look to be even worse for all of us—including the president. As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote this week, there are a lot of good reasons to believe Trump’s standing with the American people hasn’t hit bottom yet, the main one being that the worst is yet to come. The president, Shephard writes, “is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high.”

Last weekend, Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok published a preview of coming attractions in the form of a report documenting what he’s calling the imminent “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.” As Slok documents, Trump’s economy—though quite sluggish—has been boosted by the fact that inventories rose rapidly as firms acted in anticipation of tariffs being imposed. Now that tariffs have arrived, the sugar high is over and collapse is on the way. The most straightforward way of looking at the future is on page 4 of Slok’s report.

What we have here is the prelude to the summer of scarcity, coming soon to a retailer near you. We are already well and fully in the stage where activity at our ports falls off a cliff. As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote this week:

This is how it begins. The recession has arrived in Seattle, with cargo shipments down 60 percent. Los Angeles will be next. As recently as November, the Los Angeles Times reported that cargo traffic at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reached record highs. But last week it quoted the port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, predicting that “in two weeks’ time, arrivals will drop by 35 percent.” The reason, Seroka said, was that “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal.”

From here, Tim says, there will be less cargo to ship across the country, and inevitably, fewer people employed to do that work. Already, UPS has laid off 20,000 workers because of “current macro-economic uncertainty” that I really think wasn’t all that uncertain when Trump was reelected. This only highlights another grim reality: Even if Trump called off his tariffs tomorrow, much of the coming mayhem is baked into our future, as it would take a substantial amount of time to restart the global shipping machine. “Expect ships to sit offshore, orders to be canceled, and well-run generational retailers to file for bankruptcy,” says Slok.

The latter half of that prediction may well be the more devastating part. As Marketwatch’s Steve Goldstein highlighted, Slok said that “small businesses that account for more than 80 percent of employment and capital expenditure don’t have the working capital to pay tariffs.” In other words, Trumpnomics will soon be best known for that which is absent: products on the shelves of retailers, and businesses on the streets where you live, now shuttered.

Here is where the Wall Street versus Main Street divide is going to be keenly illuminated as Trump’s tariffs start the economic bloodletting. The White House has rather persistently explained away the turmoil its tariffs have wrought as a harm done only to high-flying financiers, and claimed that the benefits to ordinary people would soon emerge. A day after he got hit with a hundred dreadful evaluations of his first 100 days, Trump was spinning out on Truth Social, promising that the boom was on the wing.

But even as the stock markets have pitched and yawed as investors cling to their naïve beliefs that Trump has a plan (he doesn’t), those plying their trade on Main Street are planning for a different sort of boom. To hear Casey Ames—the founder of Harkla, a small, 10-person firm in Idaho that sells products for special needs children—tell it, Trump’s tariffs have already forced him to make some grim considerations.

Ames told the Idaho Statesman that his company was set to have a banner year. “We had just hired more people, and we were forecasting a really good year, even with the initial Trump tariffs,” he said. Now, however, he’s facing a massive hike in the amount of import taxes he’ll have to pay, from $26,000 to $346,000. With no domestic manufacturer capable of supplying the same goods, and knowing that even modest price hikes could crater sales, Ames is suddenly facing a situation where he may have to lay off employees.

Ames has garnered a lot of attention for sharing his experiences on social media, taking his audience behind the curtain to reveal what small-business owners have to expect as the summer of scarcity begins. Over at The New York Times, where they’ve been doing a long-running bit where Frank Luntz interviews the 14 dumbest voters in America, this fissure recently emerged: Meagan, the focus group’s lone small-business owner, told Luntz that the tariffs were a “very, very scary thing” and that she was, as a result, in “crisis mode.” If reality has started to penetrate Luntz’s Delulu Conclave, we’re all in for a world of hurt.

And that’s probably the most dreadful reckoning, as we mark the 100th day of Trump’s second term. Trump’s collapse in public opinion polling—along with the fact that he’s not likely to reverse many of his worst decisions or repair the things he’s broken—has probably set his presidency on the road to ruin. But if Trump has truly sown the seeds of his own undoing, it will be ordinary Americans who reap the proceeds of that dire harvest first, in the form of lost livelihoods and scuppered wealth. It’s going to be a rough summer—and many seasons thereafter, until one day we finally hit the nadir of Trumpian despair.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. If you’re a small-business owner with a story to tell about how tariffs are impacting your bottom line, contact my colleague Grace Segers.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it—well, two or three other times, at least: Democrats have found themselves in a content-creation war with the Trumpian right. And this pitched battle isn’t being fought on your grandfather’s media landscape. There’s no more publishing a white paper or a New York Times op-ed and hoping for the best. Today’s information environment favors brawlers, cheap-shot artists, and the commitment to creating conflict and controversy around any issues that can possibly be politicized.

For a party that favors civics over salaciousness, this has been a tough lesson for Democrats to learn. But we’re seeing some of them adapt. The biggest success story of late is Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who took up the cause of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported and imprisoned in El Salvador. But Van Hollen finds himself in an annoying two-front war: On one side, there is an unrepentant Trump administration; on the other, some of his more sclerotic Democrat colleagues.

Van Hollen made a politically risky commitment to travel to El Salvador last week to meet with Abrego Garcia, and promoted his trip relentlessly. His visit provoked the right into mini-meltdowns, including a try-hard attempt to engineer some fakery involving margaritas, while sending Trump himself into one of his Truth Social tailspins, in which he accused Van Hollen—in a pot-meets-kettle classic—of “grandstanding.”

But it’s 2025, baby. He who grandstands best wins, and in Van Hollen’s case, his efforts earned him a place on every single Sunday show. From pillar to post, this was a stunningly well-executed bit of political theater, proof positive that if you’re willing to give the media what it wants—conflict and controversy—they will reward you with coverage. Best of all, Democrats have ample room to pick big fights on matters that are righteous and substantive, like our rights to due process, and not on weird, off-putting GOP fixations, like the relative fuckability of a cartoon piece of candy.

Sadly, not all Democrats are seeing the light. One of Axios’s recent collections of aggregated bullet points included a comment from an anonymous “centrist” Democrat who called Trump’s rendering of immigrants to foreign prisons a “soup du jour,” insisting that the president was “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it.” And one Democrat who was at least willing to put their name to similar convictions was California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the fight to secure Abrego Garcia’s rights a “distraction” from arguing about tariffs and the economy.

This is a deeply funny thing to say when you’re a governor who has launched a side hustle as a just sayin’ podcaster. More to the point, there are some staggering misapprehensions at work in these critiques, the first being that Democrats have “walked into a trap.” There seems to be an abiding belief that to stick up for a legally wronged immigrant somehow puts Democrats on the wrong side of the issue, but this is simply not the case. Yes, I’ve seen and lamented some of the public opinion polls in which majorities support deportations, but what Trump is doing is a thing apart—and deeply unpopular. As Alex Shephard wrote last week:

Even polls that show voters broadly favoring Trump’s approach to immigration show that the public is furious about his handling of cases like Garcia’s. Fifty-six percent of respondents to a late March Reuters/Ipsos poll said that the administration should not “keep deporting people despite a court order to stop,” with only 40 percent agreeing it should keep doing so. Nearly every poll tracking the administration’s refusal to obey with court orders stopping deportation shows something similar: Voters really do not like it when Trump ignores court orders. And the issue is bringing down overall support for his approach to immigration.

Between the time Alex wrote that piece and I typed this paragraph, it became official: Public support for Trump’s approach to immigration is tanking. In some surveys, he is underwater. Half of Americans say Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., versus just a quarter who say he should not. Someone sprung a trap all right: Chris Van Hollen.

The second bit of stupidity here is that talking about the curtailment of immigrants’ due process rights is a “distraction.” The notion that Democrats lack the bandwidth to talk about immigration and the economy at the same time really looks ridiculous in light of the fact that Trump ran an entire, successful presidential campaign on talking about immigration and the economy—plus a constant demonization of trans people. Forever defying convention, Trump somehow managed to talk about three whole things! And yet, Democrats can’t dare to talk about just two.

This is simply out-of-touch thinking. We live in a world where ordinary Americans have to contend with a litany of political problems. To tell voters that some of their concerns don’t actually matter is a recipe for disaffection. Beyond that, our information environment requires political parties to be nimble and varied, keeping old conflicts burning while surfacing new controversies. But that doesn’t mean every Democrat has to do it all. There’s nothing wrong with taking up a pet issue and becoming the go-to person on the matter, as Van Hollen has done with Abrego Garcia. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to be latching onto the issue of congressional stock trading. If Newsom wants to be one of the tariff guys in the party, he’s free to dig in and make himself useful.

The interesting thing about this approach is that it mirrors some of the things that the best journalists do to make their name in this industry: Reporters who can grab a hold of a specific story and work it relentlessly can quickly become a star on a particular beat. Democrats would be well served to treat their organization against Trump the way a roomful of reporters and editors tackle the news each day: Assign people to dig deep into a particular issue, build good sources, surface the stories of victims of Trumpian misrule, and otherwise constantly iterate on the assignment anytime there is fresh material. By thinking like a newsroom, Democrats might actually find themselves more seamlessly jibing with an industry with which they’ve struggled to synchronize.

Suffice it to say, success begins with an acknowledgment that the landscape is shifting—and the rules have changed. Some, like Van Hollen, are getting with the program and easing into a new way of doing things. Other Democrats may find themselves being left behind; but the worse scenario is that the more moribund members of the party might undermine the efforts of their more highly effective peers with their carping and complaining. This is a time for some to lead and some to follow, and for others to get out of the way.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Gretchen Whitmer came to Washington this week and, in a high-profile appearance, took herself out of the running for the 2028 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Only, she probably doesn’t know she did that. (That’s OK, she just read it here first.)

The exact moment where things went awry for the Michigan governor came when she attempted to defend the very thing that had raised the specter of a recession that will wreck millions of Americans’ livelihoods: Trump’s insane tariffs scheme, which caused such unholy havoc over the last few days that he was forced to issue a partial suspension of hostilities on Wednesday afternoon, pausing the implementation of escalated tariffs on most nations for 90 days (while retaining 10 percent across-the-board tariffs and upping his trade-war ante against China to an insane 125 percent).

It was against this backdrop that Whitmer breezed in from cloud-cuckoo-land to lend Trump a bipartisan shoulder to cry on. “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you, here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America—more cars and chips, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade,” she said, in a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations. “We should be able to celebrate good policy no matter where it comes from, and also criticize bad policy no matter where it comes from.” She followed up this performance by allowing herself to get baited into participating in an Oval Office photo op, where she stood by cringing as Donald Trump signed an executive order asking the Justice Department to investigate two former White House aides for treason.

And that’s a wrap on Whitmer 2028.

Am I being unfair here? For sure, Whitmer would probably complain that I’m leaving out the fact that she criticized Trump’s tariffs as a “triple whammy: higher costs, fewer jobs and more uncertainty.” But I’m not leaving that out at all. I am, in fact, including it to better highlight the exact moment she should have stopped talking—because the rest of what she said was opinion-polling poison. Everything Trump touches dies, and tariffs are no different. Serious politicians should not be spending their time trying to co-sign his ideas. Voters will have nothing nice to say about tariffs come election season.

Whitmer is somewhat cross-pressured, admittedly: The labor leaders who have a vested interest in her state’s governance have some unfortunately mixed-to-positive feelings about Trump’s tariffs—even as members of their unions lose their jobs as a result. It’s tough that this is her burden to bear, but I recommend she bear it as the governor of Michigan and not as a Democratic presidential aspirant. And for the sake of those aspirants, she should bear it very quietly, so as not to trouble the news cycle with the kind of talk that might sabotage their chances of winning.

It must be said, though, that much of what Whitmer has to say about tariffs makes me question whether she’s a reliable voice on the topic at all. She claims to understand Trump’s “motivation” (it’s actually more like a “fixation”). But if she did, then she wouldn’t have anything complimentary to say about it. Trump believes that tariffs should replace the income tax, which as Tim Noah demonstrates at length is a notion both ahistorical and innumerate. The Trump administration believes that the federal workforce, as a pool of laborers, would be more productive if they were working for minimum wage at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. The only way to “understand Trump’s motivation” is to see the multiple layers of stupidity at work in his seething brain.

Whitmer is right to want more stuff made in America, but she’s wrong to offer Trump—who is driven by mental infirmity and the need to dominate other nations—any kind of concession, especially when his plan won’t work. We’re not going to be commanding the industries of the future by simultaneously imposing recession-inducing tariffs and cutting off the money for research “into new materials for jet engines, propulsion systems, large-scale information networks, robotics, superconductors, and space and satellite communications, as well as cancer” cures, as Trump did this week. This is why you cannot, actually, “celebrate good policy no matter where it comes from”—all of Trump’s policies in combination make the economy worse and the future darker.

There might have been a time when the mastery of technocratic wonkery was effective politics. It was, at least, in vogue for a while. But the nation has been drop-kicked into a new information environment where it is decidedly bad politics to devote yourself to a complicated explanation of how tariffs can create positive sum trade outcomes that might blah blah blah—I feel bored even typing this! In 2025, if you are explaining, you are losing. You should be taking the cheapest of shots at a bad and infirm man wrecking the country, not leading a graduate seminar. If you want to know how it goes when a presidential candidate talks about being “for something before they were against it” and pitches themselves as the person who will take a bad president’s terrible idea and make it work with the right dose of managerial panache, google “John Kerry.”

Look, I know that we’ve employed tariffs from time to time in perfectly sane ways. I know that they should be part of a good steward’s economic tool kit. But Trump’s actions over the past few weeks have indelibly tainted them. In upcoming elections, tariffs are going to poll about as well as feline AIDS or getting punched in the throat. So there’s only one way for Democrats with national aspirations to characterize them for the next few years: as a recipe for economic wreckage that the entire MAGA-pilled Republican Party supports. One day, tariffs may achieve redemption, but it won’t be on the 2028 campaign trail—at least not if you want to stay on it.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Is it too soon for any of us to start thinking about the post-Trump future? There are many reasons why the obvious answer is yes. The GOP has spent approximately a billion dollars on voter suppression over the past year. The president’s national security adviser is apparently dishing in multiple unsecured group chats. There are a bunch of overlapping antidemocracy forces—from Silicon Valley’s oligarchs to Project 2025’s goons—all trying to immanentize their bespoke eschatons every hour of every day. And now, the president has gutted what was once a roaring economy with nonsensical tariffs. Taken as a whole, it’s not hard to simply file “the future” under “in doubt.”

Nevertheless, the forces of Trumpism are having a very big problem earning the consent of the governed as their all-stick-no-carrot approach to autocracy has only created a suddenly vibrant resistance that’s protesting local Tesla dealerships and storming Republican town halls. So discussions of what might come next are already kicking around, with various Democrats planning on bringing new blood to Congress or slowly shuffling toward a presidential run. In the nation’s capital this week, Senator Cory Booker grabbed and held the media’s attention in a marathon 25-hour speech that was a content-creation victory for his party and a boost to his personal political brand.

Still, a lot of the recent futurecasting has nothing to do with the goings-on in the halls of power. Rather, it’s arisen because of what’s been going down on the book-tour circuit, thanks to the timely publication of a slew of new books—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, and Mark Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works—that collectively map out what’s being called “the abundance agenda”: a rather utopian vision that asks our political leaders to tear out all the red tape that holds our biggest ideas back and devote a monomaniacal focus to building stuff.

The New Republic’s Tim Noah has wrestled with these ideas at greater lengths than I can. To my mind, however, I find the timing of the abundance push to be lamentable. It’s pretty clear that these authors essentially anticipated a Democratic win last November. They might have even helped spur one had their ideas made it to market sooner: For all of the abundance agenda’s flaws, theirs is still a laudably optimistic mission that we can all undertake together. Such visionary quests are a mainstay in good campaign messaging, and Kamala Harris could have used something like this to anchor her campaign to a new(ish) idea. Unfortunately, these authors’ ideas have fallen into the unsweetest spot of all: The party of good government is out of power, and the people who are in power are bent on wrecking everything—the civil service, the economy, and the rule of law.

It’s that latter fact of life that really spells doom for the abundance agenda. What we’re learning in real time is that the civil service is one of the country’s most important engines of prosperity: It keeps the country’s gears spinning, all while keeping us safe and spreading wealth to communities. Every government agency that’s torn down to the joists is going to put a huge dent in our productive capacity. Every canceled government grant is a hole torn in the fabric of the future. Every fired federal worker is a post left unattended. Without key agencies like the CDC and the USDA running properly, Americans will simply die sooner and sicken more often, further kneecapping our workforce.

Last week I talked about how important it is for Democrats to bring attention to DOGE’s myriad harms, surface the people who have been hit the hardest by its wanton disregard for the civil service, and keep pumping those stories into the media maw to maximize conflict with the GOP. But there’s an important overarching message that Democrats need to convey, as well. DOGE isn’t about government spending, right-sizing budgets, or the promotion of efficiency. It’s simply about laying waste—burning the government down to its foundations—and it’s every bit as capacious and consuming a vision of the future as anything the abundance bros have come up with.

The GOP has long given up on winning over voters by demonstrating that it knows best how to make the government work for people; as I’ve noted previously, the notion that there are even “Republican lawmakers” anymore is a quaint myth. Republicans are backing DOGE because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to incapacitate the federal government once and for all and forever alter the public’s ability to demand more from their leaders. DOGE’s proponents are making a bet that even if Democrats return to power, they’ll be left with a smoking husk instead of a functional administrative state—and that they’ll lack the willpower to rebuild it.

In this way, going on the warpath against DOGE now is as much about defining the future as it is about defending the present. Some Democrats are already thinking about it in these terms. In a recent interview with Semafor’s Dave Weigel, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that Democrats “need to start messaging” on what they intend to do if they get control of the government “right now.” “We need to put our experts on this,” said Walz. “How will we build back next time? I think it’s an opportunity … to create the agencies the way we saw them in the first place, functioning better, without all the barnacles. So, Trump might be doing us a favor. He stripped it down, he blew the motor up. We’re going to put a new motor in it and take off. And I think that’s how we have to start thinking about it.”

Walz has just one vision of this project. Other Democrats may have different opinions of what will need to be rebuilt in a post-Trump future. But no matter what, it will take a lot of political capital, and anytime Democrats gather to fix anything, a swarm of media magpies swoops in to insensately ask, over and over again, “BUT HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR IT? BUT HOW WILL YOU PAY FOR IT?” There is an array of forces standing ready to thwart Democrats’ efforts to build a better world—and as the recent failures of Senate Democrats in the budget battle showed, sometimes they are their own worst enemy.

The best thing elected Democrats can do right now is strike at the heart of DOGE’s predations and start building the public will for rebuilding what’s been torn down. And the best thing we on the left can do is take the full measure of the men and women who might be the party’s future leaders, making sure they have the mettle and the commitment for a complete, post-Trump restoration of the federal government. Anything less simply isn’t serious—not if you want a future of any kind of abundance.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The second Trump era is something of an exercise in natural consequences. What happens if you put the most flamboyantly stupid goons in charge of everything? The results will neither surprise nor confound you: It is an absolute omnishambles. Trump’s not nearly through his first 100 days, and we’ve seen markets buffeted by the administration’s trade war whiplashing, allies abandoning us as our foreign policy lapses into nihilism, and everywhere the previously well-calibrated work of the federal government is coming undone—and killing people—as Elon Musk rampages across the city.

In short, mayhem and nonsense are not in short supply, and town halls across the country are filling up with people who are pissed about Trumpian misrule. Despite all this, it wasn’t until this bizarre natsec group chat fiasco—which one social media quipster appropriately named “New phone, Houthis?”—that the Trump administration has been made to bleed in public. It’s worth exploring why that is, and what Democrats can learn from this folderol to confront a far more pressing and destructive problem: the aforementioned pillage of the civil service at the hands of DOGE.

To begin with, it should be obvious that there are some things about this flap that simply aren’t replicable—and I’m not just talking about the part where key figures on the Trump national security team accidentally loop in the editor of a major national magazine on their plans to drop bombs in Yemen. One of the biggest reasons this particular scandal has dominated the news cycle for days is simply the fact that a media organization ended up at the center of it. But after a day of the Trump administration alternating between public prevarication and slagging inadvertent Signal chat participant Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic was forced to take something other than a neutral position by publishing screenshots of the chat to prove—contra the inveterate liars in the White House—that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had indeed revealed precise plans for airstrikes on Houthi rebels.

Democrats, by and large, believe that this is how it should always go with the political press: that some sort of civic impulse might stir in the media’s breast, pushing them in the direction of critical thinking and coverage that comes down against irresponsible and immoral actors. This might be the news industry we deserve, but it’s not the one we have, and Democrats will continue to suffer dismay as long as they harbor the illusion that the press will reform itself and align itself with the cause of keeping our civic fabric intact.

That said, this week’s contretemps over the group chat did engender something that can be replicated: Angry Democrats are now in the public eye, eviscerating the GOP. This is one of the big rules in the current information landscape in which we’re forced to live: Conflict creates content. The media beast may be cynical, but it is reliable—and if you feed it enough antagonism, it will hand over the headlines. Given the opportunity to get down to some good old-fashioned battering of Republicans, the outrage of Democrats got, and held, the media’s attention.

Democrats need to scheme up ways to do this kind of thing every day. It shouldn’t be hard: DOGE’s destruction is handing Democrats daily fodder. Now they need to take it and muster the same sort of passion that’s been on display as they torched Trump’s natsec nimrods. That means finding regular opportunities to sound off in front of whatever reporters, television cameras, and microphones are at hand.

It also means thinking unconventionally. One of the most appealing aspects of The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky’s idea of putting together a shadow Cabinet is the way it can be fashioned into a dagger aimed squarely at the heart of Elon Musk’s enterprise, by combining expert argument (here’s where an army of pissed-off federal employees fired by Musk can help a lot) with combat-ready liberal figures. Such an enterprise would pile up the pressure on Trump while taking it off the Democrats’ respective minority leaders in the House and Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, who just aren’t built for political fisticuffs.

That said, there are lots of current operations underway that also provide ammunition for the content creation wars. Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, as I’ve previously noted, has been an attention-getting boon for the forces of anti-Trumpism. The Democrats are also making great hay staging their own “empty chair” town halls, invading red districts to talk to disaffected voters in places where DOGE cuts hit hardest. And those hits keep on coming: The fact that Elon Musk is damaging the lives of people in places like Osage County, Oklahoma, is opening the doors for Democrats in parts of the country where they’ve had little political luck.

This week, as Democrats grilled the members of the Trump administration who’d perpetuated the group chat flap, they did so with the palpable sense that they enjoyed the taste of blood in their teeth—while uncharacteristically staying on message. While the administration has attempted to wave away criticism, Democrats haven’t budged from the central idea that the group chat was uniquely destructive and disqualifying.

This is exactly how they need to characterize DOGE, because otherwise Musk’s rabid crusade could become cemented in the public eye as a legitimate part of the overall debate about government spending. This is exactly what the GOP is hoping for: Even as public approval of Musk plummets, Republicans like Senate Majority Leader John Thune are trying to pass off DOGE’s sabotage as part of their broader attempt to cut spending (to fund taxes for the rich, of course).

Democratic pushback on DOGE can build on previous successes in fending off the Trump administration’s rapaciousness. When Obamacare was under attack, Democratic unity was key to saving the program from the predations of GOP legislative majorities. Then, it was “Hands off my health care”; now, it’s “Hands off my Social Security” and “Hands off my private data.” These are especially potent rallying cries because they show how every community will be touched by DOGE’s corruption. Suddenly, Democrats have a thousand different ways to reach millions of different voters. That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along all too often.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

In February of 2021, a fitness instructor named Khing Hnin Wai shot what might be history’s most viral aerobics lesson. Filming herself in front of a major thoroughfare in Myanmar’s capital city, Khing went through her paces, gyrating purposefully to some up-tempo music. The real action, however, was in the background, as a convoy of armored vehicles sped in her direction. Khing had accidentally recorded the beginnings of a military coup—and created the most lasting artifact of the overthrow of Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government.

Here in the United States this week, employees of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who rarely if ever made headlines beyond the fact that their agency is often the venue for White House Correspondents’ Dinner after-parties, were rousted from their place of work by armed authorities backing Elon Musk’s misnamed wrecking crew, the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s goons were apparently unmoved by the fact that USIP is not an executive branch agency and thus outside of DOGE’s alleged purview. The episode raised important questions about whether there are appreciable limits to the private property that DOGE can enter and take over. Unfortunately, much of the media stood there, dancing, as one more instance of Trumpian misrule unfolded behind them.

To write about the plain facts of the Trump administration is, admittedly, a challenge. It can be hard to write a straight news story about an unlawful administration careening through constitutional boundaries without sounding a bit hysterical. I’ve had a two-year head start on most of the political media in writing about Trump’s plan to effect a wholesale demolition of the civil service and transform it into an engine of malevolence; back when I started, I thought long and hard about whether I’d come off as overreacting. But now that we’ve reached the other side of the election, it’s become clear to me that one can almost never overreact when responding to Trump.

I wish more media professionals would realize this. Unfortunately, all around us I see more of the same exercises in sanewashing that we saw in the media’s disastrous run-up to the 2024 election. The aforementioned siege of the Institute of Peace is a perfect case in point. The New York Times characterized the matter as a “simmering dispute” between two sides that don’t have equal standing where the truth is concerned. But one is an agency that says, correctly, that it is “a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch,” and the other is a group of unaccountable thugs whose response is, “We don’t care.” Still, at least the Times made note of the fact that armed police were part of this “standoff.” One local news station left that out of their account.

But the way the media is covering the mundanity of Trump’s mob rule is just as bad as the way it sands off the edges of its most dramatic confrontations. As Tom Scocca and Joe McLeod wrote Tuesday for their newsletter, Indignity, the press is stuffed to the gills with accounts that stipulate that Trump and his associates have “fired” scads of government workers. Just this week, it was reported by a wide variety of news organizations that Trump had fired a pair of FTC commissioners. But as the authors noted, that was not, in fact, what had happened:

Donald Trump did not fire any commissioners from the [Federal Trade Commission] today. Donald Trump declared that he had fired the commissioners. That is, functionally, he announced a desire that he should have the power to fire FTC commissioners and named the commissioners that he would fire if he were to have that power—a power which he does not, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, possess.

“It is hard to fit that into a headline!” Scocca and McLeod acknowledged. “Yet it is essential for news outlets to find a way.” I wish I saw more of an effort toward that goal, and less of the brain-breaking examples of headline torture I saw in last week’s Times’ account of Trump’s strong-arming of the GOP, titled, “Trump, With More Honey Than Vinegar, Cements an Iron Grip on Republicans.” Does that set a new standard for the mixed metaphor? Between vinegar, honey, cement, and iron, it certainly sets a mixed-media record.

Or consider a report of a more recent vintage from The Washington Post: “Trump has a plan to remake the economy. But he’s not explaining it very well.” The piece reduces the trouble the president is having on the economic front—where for the first time he’s underwater on polls—to one in which he’s left the investor class with insufficient insight into his master plan. In this telling, the president’s claims of a soon-to-arrive golden age are taken at face value. “If the administration’s plan succeeds, the $30 trillion U.S. economy would be remade,” the article claims, adding that the United States was set to become “even more self-sufficient, producing more of its energy, lumber, steel and computer chips than ever before.”

Paul Krugman greeted this article’s array of assertions and unfalsifiable claims with something more reality-based: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Trump’s problem is that he’s doing a poor job of explaining his plan. I think his problem is that he’s offering fake answers to fake problems, and the public—unlike, apparently, the Washington Post—isn’t buying it.” That seems right to me. Beyond that, if anyone is actually in need of an “explanation” about Trump’s economic plans, I’d say that once you understand that everything proceeds from the fact that the president is an omnidirectionally corrupt moron whose desperate need for adulation fuels his every decision, with the added problem that he has, since his first term, become more intellectually infirm, everything starts to make sense. The constant whiplashing between implementing and retracting tariffs, the constant characterization of prosperity as a bad thing, the wild-eyed talk of how economic hardship will finally set us all free—all of this stems from the simple fact that the man at the top is a deceitful asshole with a cranial cavity full of damp parsley.

Like I said, you can sound a little strange when you straight-facedly account for the plain facts of this administration. But what’s the alternative? Most of what the Trump administration does, every day, is act illegally or unconstitutionally, rampaging and pillaging the government in ways that we’d discuss in much clearer terms if it were happening in some other autocracy—like Myanmar, for example.

As Scocca and McLeod wrote, “A constitutional crisis is also a crisis of newswriting, because it is a crisis of knowing.” One of the biggest debates that seems to be raging in the media right now is whether or not we are actually allowed to tell the truth about the Trump administration—to state clearly that unconstitutional corruption is afoot in the nation’s capital with the same clarity and urgency we once used to talk about, say, a secretary of state’s private email server. Are we going to actually tell the public what is going on, or are we going to stand in front of it, dancing energetically in a fluorescent-yellow outfit?

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Last November, voters elected a president who’d largely campaigned on an unrelenting hostility to trans people and a plan to let Silicon Valley oligarchs gut the civil service and turn government into a machine for the president’s self-enrichment and political revenge. Much of the political press either ignored this stuff or didn’t care enough to inform their readers—some were too busy trying to polish a mass deportation scheme into a sensible response to the housing crisis—but some of us, here at The New Republic and elsewhere, went hoarse trying to warn about the consequences.

And now here we are. While it’s early days, Trump’s second term has been going about the way you’d expect the presidency of an anti-trans, pro-oligarch, corrupt mass deporter to go: not well! Migrants are effectively being thrown into internment camps, a gang of child cybercriminals are heisting our personal data, and what’s left of the civil service is bogged down wondering whether or not they have to send busy-work emails to gang leader Elon Musk. Meanwhile, Trump has largely checked out, prompting Musk, on multiple occasions, to step in as the president’s emotional-support fascist during public appearances.

If you’re fond of certain social media memes—sowing/reaping, how it started/how it’s going, fuck around/find out—this is a real boom time. But here’s the bottom line: Trumpism isn’t working. This mostly portends pain for the country and the planet, but there’s a silver lining to be found in a president who has screwed up so royally this soon into his post-inauguration honeymoon period: His opponents have an unexpected advantage.

Right now, Trump’s biggest weakness is the very thing he believed was going to confer unprecedented strength on his return to power: his attempts to purge the federal government of its loyal workforce and replace it with subservient confederates. What Trump and his cronies misunderstand is that the civil service is essentially an extension of the people’s will. While this institution is too often castigated as a faceless bureaucracy, there’s an important material connection between those who serve the public and the public that’s being served. And when you rattle the cages in Washington, those vibrations spread outward. It’s no wonder that a recent Morning Consult poll found majorities of respondents rejecting the idea that the civil service was “too liberal,” as the Trump administration has tried to get people to believe. Nor is it surprising to find that the same set of respondents are not exactly “clamoring for DOGE cuts.” At the same time, public approval is trending against Trump’s Silicon Valley suck-ups, not to mention Trump himself, of whom half the country now disapproves.

People should be worried about the destruction that Trump is wreaking. The civil service is a collection of people doing the mostly invisible work of keeping daily life thrumming along and keeping us safe from a multitude of harms. Now, everywhere you look, Americans are getting anxious. People are suddenly less convinced that they can travel by air safely. Consumer confidence is nose-diving. The percentage of Americans who feel the economy is on the wrong track has risen 10 points in less than a month.

Reading the tea leaves, the administration is now desperately trying to finger Biden as the culprit for what could be an apocalyptic jobs report, which is pretty rich coming from the administration that’s cutting programs and putting people on the unemployment rolls. “It seems unavoidable that we are headed for a deep, deep recession,” former U.S. Labor Department economist Jesse Rothstein told The Telegraph this week. Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok said that “layoffs could approach 1 million after factoring in the likely chain reaction” that Trump’s cuts to the civil service will have; Slok went on to observe that “the US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index was now higher than at any time during the great recession.”

So it’s hardly shocking that people are already starting to react as if something has gone very wrong. Republicans are facing torrents of angry voters at their own town halls, where representatives from deep-red districts are getting earfuls of anti-Musk invective and chants of “Tax the billionaires!” Some Republicans even seem chastened enough to offer the first stirrings of anti-Trump defiance that we’ve heard from members of his own party in a while. (Naturally, it’s now being suggested that Republican members cancel their town halls entirely—a curious move for a party that claims to have a mandate to govern.)

I may not be as confident as The American Prospect’s David Dayen, who says “Trump’s cooked,” but the environment is certainly more favorable to such optimism than I imagined it would be a month ago—which makes this an apt time for Democrats to up the ante. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said during an interview on CNN this week, “Our best strategy is to make sure everybody knows exactly what the Republicans are trying to do.” That’s a plan that doesn’t require a congressional majority, just a commitment.

There really is a big opportunity here, to make some fundamental shifts in public sentiment on the value of the government that Trump is trying to burn to the ground. A 2019 study by the Niskanen Center found that Americans “mistrust services provided by the public sector, even though they increasingly rely on government programs.” The misalignment is so bad, in fact, that the public tends to “misperceive good services” rendered by the government as coming from the private sector. The biggest problem, according to the study, is that most of the good work the government does is invisible—we only notice when it’s being done poorly. Because of that, the study concludes, the public’s “views of government don’t become more positive even if they directly benefit.”

As Trump and Musk stampede through Washington, and the inevitable maladies of this destruction become more visible to the public, liberals might be staring at a historic opportunity to turn public opinion on the value of government around. And they can back up their case by showing some backbone in Washington, because the price of being associated with Trumpism is too high. This week, they passed an important test with flying colors when they voted in lockstep against the Republican budget plan, and with considerable aplomb: California Representative Kevin Mullin flew to Washington to cast his vote straight from being discharged from the hospital; his Colorado colleague Brittany Pettersen made a similar sojourn with her newborn son.

All in all, this was an instructive week of how an out-of-power party can offer a steely response to, and take advantage of, a stumbling Trump. So let the cheap clickbait merchants beat on about how Democrats would be better off rolling over and playing dead. With public sentiment riding against Trump’s designs and no end in sight to the chaos he and Musk foment, there’s never been a better time for the party that believes in government to defend that government, connecting the ruination of the civil service to the ruination that will be visited on ordinary people. Democrats might be locked out of power, but they don’t need a parliamentary majority to land damaging blows against a flailing president and party. Strike while the iron is hot.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.